A Complicated Actor Who Made a Complicated Mob Boss Indelible

“I feel like I came in at the end of something great,” Tony Soprano told his therapist in the first episode of “The Sopranos,” the series that turned a little-known actor named James Gandolfini into the definitive postmodern mob boss.

Tony wouldn’t say what his business really was, and that gave his malaise a more metaphorical feel — the fear of decline he described could just as easily have been about the nation’s best years as the job he described as “waste management consultant.”

It didn’t take long to see that Tony’s lament was also an inside joke about the waning of the mobster genre. When “The Sopranos” began in 1999 on HBO, it seemed as if all the great organized-crime sagas, like “The Godfather” and “Goodfellas,” had already been made and that whatever came next could only be tepid imitations of more lasting work.

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James Gandolfini as Tony Soprano in a scene from one of the last episodes of “The Sopranos.”CreditCraig Blankenhorn/HBO

David Chase knew and did better. “The Sopranos” was a transformative series for television: it was the making of HBO and it helped shift the balance of creativity from networks to cable.

And Mr. Gandolfini, who died on Wednesday in Rome at 51, turned the image of the old-school Mafioso upside down.

Tony became a totemic figure not because he was so special, but because he could be so ordinary, a typical American dad trying to balance family responsibilities and the family business — only his line of work wasn’t insurance or used cars, it was crime. One of the better comic riffs was that racketeering is like any other racket: profits dwindle, employees shirk their duties, and younger protégés don’t know their place.

Tony was a mobster on Prozac, the head of a crime family with mommy issues, a suburban dad who doted on wild ducks and killed people, sometimes just because he felt like it. He was a “Big & Tall” bully with a disarming smile, a ladies’ man who sounded as if he had waking sleep apnea.

That opéra bouffe in six seasons would probably have burned itself into the country’s psyche even without Mr. Gandolfini. “The Sopranos” lowered the limits on violence, sex and profanity, and also lifted viewers’ expectations, offering the kind of wit, psychological insight and cinematic style that until then had seemed the preserve of art films.

But without Mr. Gandolfini, the series would certainly not have been as much fun. Mr. Gandolfini and Edie Falco, as Tony’s wife, Carmela, were perfectly matched — and peerless — in the art of balancing high drama and low humor. Mr. Gandolfini said he thought of Tony as a more violent version of Ralph Kramden in “The Honeymooners,” but the couple’s ups and downs weren’t always played for laughs. Their most fraught marital battles were as intense and mesmerizing as any by Edward Albee or Tennessee Williams.

The entire cast was superb, but Tony, most of all, could say some deliciously foolish things without ever becoming a clown. (He once mangled the proverb about revenge being a dish best served cold, saying, “Revenge is like serving cold cuts.”)

Tony wasn’t the only mobster in therapy. “Analyze This,” a comedy starring Robert De Niro as a mobster who consults a shrink, came out the year “The Sopranos” began. But in that contest between Mr. De Niro and Mr. Gandolfini, it was the small-screen actor who had more staying power in the part. Tony was the more intriguing character.

Even after so many murders, love affairs, family disputes, disappointments and protracted dream sequences, he was a low-class thug with charm and mystery.

Tony Soprano became a mythic hero in American culture, and that was hard for the actor to live down. “I never think about him, ever,” Mr. Gandolfini once told an interviewer.

Television, far more than movies, has a way of imprisoning its biggest stars. Hit shows last for years, and once viewers fall in love with a favorite character, they don’t like to let go. Carroll O’Connor was always Archie Bunker; Daniel J. Travanti never got out from under the shadow of his role as Frank Furillo in “Hill Street Blues”; and Jerry Seinfeld is still the bachelor comedian hanging out in a coffee shop with Elaine, George and Kramer.

Tony was at times a poignant figure, a made man at war with his own nature, struggling to not become the person we all knew him to be. When Mr. Gandolfini died, he was still working hard to not be entirely defined by the role of a lifetime.

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Mr. Gandolfini with John Magaro in the movie “Not Fade Away.”CreditBarry Wetcher/Paramount Vantage

The actor did better than many. He was an Italian-American who seemed born to play a New Jersey mobster — he grew up there, in Park Ridge. His father was an Italian immigrant who worked as a bricklayer and a janitor, and his mother was a lunch lady at a high school cafeteria. But he fought against type.

In 2007 he produced and narrated an excellent HBO documentary about wounded war veterans, “Alive Day Memories: Home From Iraq,” and made a point of keeping his distance from the camera and letting the soldiers do the talking. He followed that three years later with another documentary on the subject, “Wartorn: 1861-2010.”

His first major role after “The Sopranos” was on Broadway in 2009. He played a father from Cobble Hill in “God of Carnage.” He channeled the former Central Intelligence Agency director Leon Panetta in “Zero Dark Thirty,” a Giuliani-like mayor in the remake of “The Taking of Pelham 123.” He took a stab at political satire, playing an American antiwar general in the British spoof “‘In the Loop.”

No other role ever came close to offering the complex contradictions of Tony Soprano. Behind the scenes, Mr. Gandolfini had his own share of inconsistencies. He was a fiercely private person who had a public battle with drugs and alcohol.

He was a shy, quite humble actor who once described his physique in a movie as a “jelly doughnut in a camouflage outfit.” But Mr. Gandolfini went on a one-man strike over a salary dispute that drove HBO to shut down production at the start of the show’s fifth season. (His agents argued that he should be paid at the same level as other leading television actors like Dennis Franz of “N.Y.P.D. Blue” and Kelsey Grammer of “Frasier.”)

When he returned to the set, Mr. Gandolfini presented some colleagues with personal checks for tens of thousands of dollars, saying, “Thanks for putting up with me.”

The series ended on a mischievously ambiguous note, building to a denouement, but then letting the screen go blank and leaving millions of viewers in the dark about whether Tony lived or died at the restaurant table.

Mr. Gandolfini kept trying to kill off Tony Soprano and move on, and he will be best remembered for making that mob boss immortal.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Complicated Actor Who Made A Complicated Mob Boss Indelible. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe